The main issue is that they take A LOT of time for CCP. I have talked to one of them, and he told me that without even noticing. Each day, they speak several hours with CCP staff. And for what ? To discuss balancing and gamedesign. FFS, gamedesign. Do they think they are some kind of professionals or something ?
The CSM could be useful if they were just here to actually communicate (in both ways) instead of participating to stuff they have no skills for.
Well, ok, I am unfair. They are actually consulted for feedback.
Feel free to enumerate the ways you would find superior to having a customer-selected oligarchy to talk to developers. Admitted, I am not very knowledgeable about Scrum (the software engineering method used by CCP). Scrum is somewhat flexible for various uses, but at least CCP themselves have used to word "agile". Which, in software development, should not mean the Dilbertist "just start coding without planning and documentation", but rather frequent consultation of the customer and/or other related expert groups for feedback. Some agile methods even require that a customer representative (who quite likely is not a programmer and does not necessarily know anything about software at all) is present with each programming team or even with each programmer. Now, can't remember how many CSM delegates there are, but if there's about a hundred staff members working for EVE (out of 600 total!*) then a few middle management folks or senior game designers working with the CSM for a few hours a day is essentially nothing, even if each delegate would get their own pet dev.
After refreshing my memory from Wikipedia (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrum_%28development%29), it is most likely that the CSM, which are one of the Stakeholders (in addition to "in-house customers" etc.), discuss with Product Owners. Some POs may also work with code, but that isn't required. Their main task is to collect use cases and do requirement engineering. As such, no, two hours daily is actually a very short time. Each dev team takes up to a day to launch their Sprint, and up to a day to finish a Sprint. One Sprint lasts from a week to a month of effective development time. Dev teams need not to be synchronous. If the PO isn't a coder, he can discuss the next Sprint with the Stakeholders and prepare the backlog ahead of time for the Sprint Planning meeting with the actual developers, i.e. collect requirements at a chat with the CSM, then write use cases and specifications which are actually used for planning with the dev team. Devs estimate how much time each task takes, and then the PO (possibly together with the CSM and other Stakeholders) discusses on priority of features, constrained by development time. Once this is done, the PO discusses the Sprint Backlog (short-term plan) with the devs. This is followed by the dev team deciding what to do, when to do, and how to do. (With the goal to do everything in the Sprint Backlog in the constrained time.) Additionally POs additionally get briefed daily (for about 15 minutes) and the PO and Stakeholders once the Sprint is done. Rinse and repeat. The goal of this all is two-fold: Requirements management for complex projects (what is possible, what new prospects were found out during implementation) and making sure that
this doesn't happen (as it may happen when requirements are set to stone before the project starts, someone misunderstands, and the result doesn't get seen until :18months: later).
In addition to that, in a matrix organization an individual developer is likely having multiple roles in multiple development teams. So he can do his job for team B while the PO sorts out with Important Internet Politicians what team A should do next.
*) Admitted, the "over 600 employees" does include marketdroids & other suits, cantina staff and such people who are not exactly essential to game design.
Edit: History of the tree swing comic:
http://www.businessballs.com/treeswing.htm (whoa, it's been around since the 70s or possibly late 60s)
